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A yes shouldn’t last forever in Ontario’s urban planning: Hume

Projects approved long ago take years to start — but that might provide an opportunity to truly protect our environment, writes Christopher Hume.

The Koffler Scientific Reserve stands on the Oak Ridges Moraine north of Toronto, and it might eventually be getting neighbours in the form of a luxury housing subdivision - but the provincial government can still act to thwart that, argues Christopher Hume. (LUCAS OLENIUK / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

You needn’t look far to see that planning in Ontario is anything but. It has become a process so flawed, it actually creates the opposite. Indeed, if we had set out to create a system guaranteed to result in chaos — we’ve got it.

The most recent example came last week when Riteland Holdings Inc. announced it would build a luxury housing subdivision in the Oak Ridges Moraine — more than 16 years after the project was approved.

Sixteen years! That takes us back to the last century, when concerns about climate change and suburban sprawl were somewhat less urgent than they are today. In the generation since then, things have changed. The province introduced the Green Belt in 2005 and before that, conservation measures to protect the moraine from exactly this sort of development.

This being Ontario, however, the rights of property owners take precedence over the requirements of the good planning and common sense, let alone the environment. Once an approval has been received, developers can sit and wait virtually as long as they like. A major site at the foot of Yonge St, for instance, OK’d for residential in the early 1980s, sat empty for three decades before the inevitable condo complex appeared. Along the way, many argued the land should be used for a public amenity — museum, gallery or even an opera house.

“This makes no sense,” says urban designer and architect Ken Greenberg. “There should be a sunset clause. Just think of how different the world was 16 years ago in terms of our understanding of the environment.”

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“These provisions have been put in place,” a spokesperson for the provincial Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing told the Star’s Marco Chown Oved, “to provide fairness to the process for those applications that may have been in the process before the legislation came into effect.”

That only makes sense from property owners’ perspective. It flies in the face of the province’s own legislation, undermining its efforts to protect a geological feature that contains the headwaters of both the Humber and Don rivers and whose existence is crucial to this city and the water supply to much of the GTA.

That’s why one of the main objectives of the act is “ensuring that only land and resource uses that maintain, improve or restore the ecological and hydrological functions of the Oak Ridges Moraine Area are permitted.”

Already, serious damage has been inflicted on the 160-kilometre-long moraine, which acts like a giant sponge providing drinking water for 250,000 people. Also, vast swaths continue to be taken out of circulation, witness the golf courses that have also popped up thanks to the generosity of the province’s grandfathering provisions.

Land planning, which must balance the often conflicting demands of developers, residents, the individual, the community and the public good (which obviously includes the environment), requires a level of wisdom and fortitude rare among politicos.

But even without the unique conditions of the moraine, there is no argument for approvals that last forever. Throughout the U.K., the limit is five years at most, sometimes only two. Approvals there don’t come with the property. They aren’t passed on from generation to generation as in Ontario, a land speculator’s haven.

As it happens, both the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Plan and the Green Belt (along with the Niagara Escarpment legislation) are up for provincial review this year. Here is the opportunity to strengthen the rules so they protect the moraine not the development industry. That, after all, was the intended purpose. Here, also, is a chance for Premier Kathleen Wynne to prove that her party remains committed to saving the moraine, and with it, maybe the rest of us.

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